Non-Symbolic Divination

Tea leaves. The most basic method of tasseography is non-symbolic in the sense that it does not make use of pre-determined symbols or meanings, though of course the interpretation is symbolic.

Non-symbolic divination using chia seeds.

Just a heads-up, this topic is probably only of interest to me and hardly anyone else, and in fact if you do find this interesting you are probably very weird and people should be mildly scared of you. ;) I am only putting it here because I don't have anywhere else to put it. 

I think it was Julian Jaynes who said that divination only came about as people lost their vital connection to the gods, and so became genuinely confused as to what their wisdom in a particular situation might be. In other words, people who hear from gods directly don't need divination. Gods are awfully busy these days and so you can be excused if you don't hear from them on a regular basis. ;) But divination does (and many other forms of religious practice do) represent a sort of fall from grace, from the state described in the Daodejing as "everything following its natural course." You only need divination if things are pointedly not following their natural course. This "not following nature" is unfortunately the normal state of modern Man. In case you don't know what divination is, it is a means of attempting to gain insight into a question or situation using a wide variety of occult means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divination

Symbolic divination for the purposes of this post means divination using tools whose meanings are relatively set. A classic example would be tarot cards, the meaning of each card being relatively unambiguous even if slightly modifiable in context. The use of the I Ching would be another type of symbolic divination, as would the casting of runes and many other methods. While tea reading in its most essential form is non-symbolic in this sense, there also exists methods of dividing the cup up into sectors with their own significance, and even specialized tea reading cups. Most newcomers to divination are going to be using symbolic methods of divination in this sense, as the interpretations are (to varying degrees) relatively simple to come by. 

Non-symbolic divination for the purposes of this post means divination using tools which do not have set meanings of their own. For instance, assuming you are not using one of the tea reading methods that involve assigning significance to different parts of the cup, tea reading would be one of these. You are just grokking out the patterns of the leaves in their bare arrangements. The ancient Roman method of examining the flights of particular flocks of birds would be another such example. The most bare and sparse form of non-symbolic divination would be scrying, gazing into a crystal or a body of water or a black mirror, not to make sense of patterns in the objects themselves but to enter into an altered state of consciousness which may shed light on the circumstances surrounding the situation. Non-symbolic methods of divination are typically much more difficult, not very accessible to the layman unless they are a very gifted layman. There are some people though that can pick it up right away. 

My great-grandmother was a fortune teller so perhaps I get it from her, though she herself took an extremely cynical approach to the whole thing. It was the Great Depression, she needed dough, she didn't believe any of it for a second. ;) Perhaps it was the Universe having a good chuckle when she gave my hard-headed, ultra-practical, money-loving, fortune-telling-for-profit great grandmother an impractical, mystical great-grandson. ;) I still remember first encountering the cards she used to tell fortunes with and being fascinated by them. 

Anyway, getting back to topic, these matters came up in my head as a result of me picking up rocks. Sort of aimlessly, I would pick up rocks and pebbles that caught my eye and stick them in my pocket. To me, looking at pebbles is way more interesting than looking at television, they're like little worlds. I wondered if perhaps I should write runes on them and use them as a runic method of divination but it occurred to me that this was contrary to the very reason I picked them up to begin with. I picked them up because they were individual and different, whereas runes and in a sense tarot cards and the sticks or coins you use for the I Ching are all the same. So I thought I would use them for non-symbolic divination. Just throw them down on a mat, not the kind of mat you use for tarot cards with their different meanings based on location on the mat but just a plain mat, and see what comes up. Granted it is a lot harder to do it that way, but the problem with symbolic types of divination is that they are too full of the sorts of concepts that exist in human heads. They already form the world in a human way. If divination is a symptom of separation from the gods, or separation from the state of Nature if you will, then pushing divination back towards the 'gods' means pushing it further away from human thought, human preconceived notions and human judgments. The use of human tools like cards, coins, runes and so on, is a kind of separation from nature. 

This is akin to the difference between more ritualized forms of paganism which use tools like the athame and pentagram and robes and precisely formalized rituals and so on, and more of a hedge-witch or shamanic form which uses whatever comes to hand from nature and doesn't emphasize human craft as much. However, what you don't get from non-symbolic forms of divination is the certainty of getting a reasonably intelligible answer. If you do an I Ching reading, you are going to get an answer of some sort. If you do a raw tea leaf reading (not using any set method of interpretation), you might not. In a manner of speaking, you might be asking, "should I have more bonds in my investment portfolio?" and the answer might be like a crow calling. "Caw-caw! Caw-caw!" Which to me would be an awesome answer, but might not be for everyone. ;)

I tried it out just with somewhat mixed results. I did feel like I got an answer of sorts, it is just that I am not sure how it relates to the question. It wasn't a very serious question however, almost a sort of test question, so it might not be a good trial. The question was what would be the outcome if I shared this post to my facebook page, which I normally do but didn't really initially consider doing with this post because of its subject matter. That was the question. I got two different interpretations from the stones, the first being "some gathering some scattering." The stones are all either tight up against another stone or else completely separated, and while the mass of the gathered stones is greater, the number of each kind is the same. 5 separated stones, 5 gathered stones. One of the stones did not leave the bag so it was left out. The second interpretation was "airy bird woman" or "spacey woman." The relevance of these answers seems questionable, though the stones might be calling me a spacey female for wasting time with such a trivial question. ;) Here's the stones as they were thrown, see what you think. 

Despite the mixed results (I might try the chia seeds next time), I do want to experiment with this further because there is a vibe involved very different from using the I Ching or Tarot and I quite like it. With the I Ching, you feel like you are having a conversation with the I Ching itself: like having a conversation with a specific intelligent book. This felt much more raw, more primitive, more out of my comfort zone, which I quite liked.

If the assemblage of weirdness that constitutes this blog post interests you and you try divination yourself, I need to tell you a couple things. First, divination is sort of a "second opinion," a way of gathering more information before making a decision. It does not replace the decision itself, you are still responsible for everything you do and whether you listen to the second opinions offered or not. Even if the I Ching or whatever gives you a result that is clear as a bell and cannot be mistaken, you are the decision maker. You should also not practice divination very often, the general idea is actually to not need it. As I mentioned before, if everything is "following nature," if your life is following a pattern that is sensible and natural, divination is not required or desirable. The second thing is, I would encourage complete skeptics to try divination when they feel they need a second opinion and they don't have access to one. Even if you don't believe in such things whatsoever, it is still a second opinion of a sort and might encourage you to reflect deeper on your decisions. Which almost has to be a good thing, right?

Third thing is though, that if you want to try divination you should definitely start out with the I Ching or Tarot and not non-symbolic divination. It is going to be too difficult for the average person to start with, and the I Ching is a great way to get introduced to divination and is relatively easy to use.

Should you take divination seriously? You should take everything with a grain of salt, everything. However, divination is a great inroad to visionary experiences of various sorts if you incline that direction.